Posts Tagged: Kenyon Review

Welcome to This Week in Books, where we highlight books just released by small and independent presses. Books have always been a symbol for and means of spreading knowledge and wisdom, and they are an important part of our toolkit in fighting for social justice. If we’re going to move our national narrative away from […]

Lord knows the world has changed since I wrote this talk, but when the world falls to pieces around us, especially when the world falls to pieces, writers will still sit down to write. As Beckett tells us, even when we have “no power to express” and “no desire to express,” we still have “the obligation […]

It’s actually a good thing for writers to step away from the keyboard every once in awhile. On the Kenyon Review blog, Aaron Gilbreath reminds us of the importance of tending to and strengthening the mortal vessels that our brilliant minds travel inside: Build a literary life if you want it, but don’t forget that […]

Our personal pasts aren’t factual records. They’re made up on the spot, synthesized from disjointed details to answer questions we have in the present. For KROnline, Natalie Mesnard and Patrick D. Watson work towards an excavation of memory from the points of view of poetry and neuroscience.

It’s poet John James’s turn for a conversation with the Kenyon Review. Author of the chapbook Chthonic, James dissects the process of writing a single poem, “History (n.),” the prescient unconscious, history as diagnosis, writing while parenting, and his connection to the earth. A piece of writing advice: “If you write every day, you get […]

Poet Safiya Sinclair, author of Cannibal, takes part in the Kenyon Review Conversation series with insight into race in America from a Jamaican’s point of view. Living in a white academic bubble in Charlottesville, VA, immersing herself in slavery-era texts and James Baldwin, she describes how she discovered the ways racism is reduced to the […]

At the Kenyon Review blog, Brian Michael Murphy celebrates the sheer density of reference and intricate structuring of rap lyrics revealed by a computer program, The Raplyzer, and its Rhyme Factor Scale. Murphy dissects the lyric genius of Wu-Tang’s Inspectah Deck and others: I remember the feeling from when I was 16, the sense that […]

I was recently asked by a young interviewer if writing, with all the time it takes and its use of paper (though I compose on a computer) is not antithetical to what is needed now, the speed that is, to push a speedy change of consciousness and behavior. I answered: “But it’s the writers who […]

George Saunders! America’s greatest satirist! The heir to Mark Twain’s estate! And I thought, Oh, what I wouldn’t give to hear Saunders weigh in on Trump. And then I remembered that, in a way, he already had. At the Kenyon Review blog, Cody Walker talks about how George Saunders‘s story “The Red Bow” can be […]

The affronted world’s Ahabs, crippled by attack, vow vengeance and a show of might. At The Kenyon Review blog, Karen Malpede talks about her experience of reading Moby-Dick out loud every night and explains why the book is still relevant to our lives today.

I never bring my computer with me to the basement, and the discipline of the method is to force myself to work out the ideas, the arrangement of the argument or story before I start building paragraphs and sentences. For the Kenyon Review, Brian Michael Murphy talks about how locking himself up in a basement […]

What fuels such savagery against human and animal kind? What, but the promise of great profits, the lure of luxury items, fine ivory jewelry and statues, or healing potions, gloves and seal skin coats, and free slave labor leading to the amassing of great wealth; all of which seem available merely for the taking. So […]

I want to get to why this grumbly, axe-grinding, British review of Vendler relates to two trends I see now in American poetry—the confusion over the critic’s role and the rise of literary teams—but first, the question that’s probably foremost on your mind: does Daniel Swift have a case? For the Kenyon Review, Derek Mong takes […]

I used to work more deliberately at resolving contradictions in my work. Now I tend to see contradictions as evidence that I’ve gotten close to saying something true. When we’re honest, we’re conflicted. The Kenyon Review interviews Garret Keizer about how his writing has evolved over the years.

Prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay have access to 18,000 books in 18 different languages, including Arabic translations of King Lear, Anna Karenina, and Stephen King thrillers. But books deemed critical of the US government, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Noam Chomsky’s Interventions, and various John Grisham novels, are banned. Over at The Kenyon […]

Elicit feedback. Let them know it is OK to not like certain poems, and explore moments of disappointment and discomfort. Have them address the authors directly. Encourage them to see the authors as peers. For the Kenyon Review blog, Dora Malech interviews Adam Kaplan about his experiences teaching poetry to incarcerated youth.

I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass, that the guest leaves. For the Kenyon Review blog, Meg Shevenock looks at Emily Dickinson’s “self-portrait in language.”

For me, the perfect metaphor for rethinking our relationship to other species comes in the form of a dog named “Human,”owned and “curated” by French artist Pierre Huyghe, in his retrospective currently on view at LACMA. Ironically enough, such a simple act of naming invites deep rethinking of our own human position in the world. […]

“If your teachers suggest that your poems are sentimental,” she writes, “that is only the half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Don’t be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time?” For the Kenyon Review blog, Cody Walker takes another look […]

What does Beloved have in common with The Hunger Games? How is the biopic Milk like Gone with the Wind? According to Amit Majmudar, they’re all variants of “the martyr story.” For the Kenyon Review blog, Majmudar explains our continued fascination with watching people be oppressed.

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